Five ways to maximize your disk space

Here are five ways to leverage your hard drive. With these tips you can keep your files more efficiently.

1. Use a storage administrator programs

Storage management (storage managers, for search engines) can be found in a variety of price ranges from free and open source to expensive enterprise-level systems that continuously monitor and optimize storage use of our units. Of course, you can only find the larger files, MP3s, JPEGs or PST, on your system manually. The general idea is to identify the files that are no longer needed or that could be accommodated on another drive, like a local hard disk on the PC, which usually have a lot of space unused. Do not spend too much on this point, and you can always implement policies for storage of personal files to make sure nobody in your network are hogging valuable space for your business or home.

2. Remove duplicates and compresses

Once you have purged the large files, you can use tools for deduplication or compression to allow more capacity for data. A duplicate program or de-duplication storage system review, look for the reps, and will dispose of the extra copies of your files, allowing access to its original position that takes users to the final print (and the only, at this stage of the process). Compression, however, will reduce the amount of space your files occupy. Work best for text files or generated by word processors, and less effectively in videos or music, since they come in formats that are already compressed in advance.

3. Use cheap or free alternative software

Create space for unused equipment alternative is to use cheap or free software like Linux operating system, to rehabilitate an old computer as a storage server. If you have one or more older systems gathering dust, you can set them up easily, or remove disks from older systems, usually with less capacity than the current ones, and transplanting them to other servers. Once your systems are running, you can use them to store any kind of file, although you may prefer to use them as secondary repositories, and keep units updated and improved performance to run critical applications such as email, databases, collaboration or home folders.

4. Take all secondary storage devices

Many organizations have high-performance storage systems, such as fiber channel or iSCSI RAID for critical applications. But often the same storage unit ends up being used for applications not requiring much power. You can use storage management applications, or your own manual methods, to accommodate this data. But moving the less frequently used data to a secondary disk will always serve to free space on a computer much more expensive. The storage management software enables you often create multiple levels, including higher performance data, subsystems, and external storage as optical disks or tapes.

5. move data from temporary or permanent space

If you follow all your options and running out of space in your current equipment, think about saving files in the cloud. You can move data from temporary or permanent space that gives the cloud service provider without buying new drives. The big advantage here is that the cloud storage, from a limit, you pay as you go using. The disadvantage is that you have no control over that repository. So depending on how critical is the data you drive, you might prefer to take preventive measures: Back up your information multiple times, encrypt data to the rise and in the same online space, for example. Whether you are looking counter effects of floods in Southeast Asia, or increasing amounts of data generated by your network you are getting migraines, there are alternatives to buying new drives. Many new storage systems (EMC, NetApp, HP, Compellent, etc.) offer the above features, such as space management, compression, de-duplication, storage levels and data migration. But you can also achieve the same results without buying new systems using specialized software for any price range, or move the files manually.